Elections may push up ad revenues in Q4: Zee Ent

A: Advertising growth on year to date (YTD) is good. The market is tough and the last quarter has been quite tough, the festive season wasn’t what all broadcasters had anticipated but a lot more effort we have been making in the market to sustain this level. For sometime, at least for the next two quarters we maybe challenged in the amount of money which is there in the market.

However, we are also hopeful that we will see an upside because of elections, which are going to come and probably the next quarter or towards the end of this quarter we will see advertising revenue coming in.

Ekta: Can you breakup the advertising revenue as well as the performance between the national channels, for example Zee Business versus the regional performance of the regional channels?

A: Zee News has done relatively better, some of our regional channels like Zee 24 Taas has done well; it is growing at a rate of 30 percent because the demand for the Marathi channels is growing in the Maharashtra market. The other market like west Bengal has declined for all players including us because some of the players from the money market went out of the market and therefore that affected our business. Most of the others are showing growth rate which are inline with what the national channels are showing.

Ekta: You are looking to launch a new current affairs television channel as well. Can you take us through your capex in terms of what your pipeline of new channels would look like and which one do you think would be a more lucrative opportunity, national or regional given the current advertising scenario?

A: Let me give a bit of background to our strategy in the year. Our strategy for this financial year is focused on building long-term growth engines and therefore we have been on a rapid expansion drive and revamping our business significantly. So, this year we have already launched two regional channels and in the month of January there are two more coming up. So, in all we would be launching four regional channels.

We see a significant growth potential in the regional market, each of these states is showing potential for local content and therefore channel which reflects global content. These channels that we are launching are going to be a combination of news and entertainment channel – I do not know what you mean by current affairs – but it is going to be a combination of all kinds of content starting from news to current affairs, factual entertainment and fictional entertainment. So, we have channel in Rajasthan, Vadodara, we have a channel in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, which we have launched already and in January we are going in bihar and Odisha.

Going into the next year, we are also looking at English language channels. Therefore, we see opportunity for our business to expand in multiple ways and apart from these we have also invested in vertical business; strengthening our presence in auto, luxury, lifestyle and in crime and going forward we may add more personalized verticals to our business plus we are merging our newspaper DNA with Zee Media Corporation. So, we are going to put together one integrated news media organization, Zee Media which will interest in print, national TV, regional TV and online.